Keepa is No Longer Free: Should You Pay for It?

WHAT?!?

It’s finally happened. The Amazon seller’s best friend for
deal analysis – the Keepa Chrome extension – is now a freemium service. The
only way to access its advanced features is to pay a monthly subscription cost.
Unlucky for Amazon sellers, the only features that really mean anything to them
are now hidden behind a paywall.

It’s something that people in the Amazon selling community thought was going to happen for some time. It’s such an essential tool, and the type of data you can extract from it is THAT valuable that many will see it as a no-brainer to invest in access to the features they use daily to find out whether a product is worth investing in.

Premium?!?

What’s Missing?

The two things missing from the updated Keepa Chrome extension are the Sales Rank statistics and the ability to see historic Buy Box prices. Without these, you may as well be blindfolded. You have no context as to whether the current Buy Box price is a true reflection of the price people are willing to pay for the product. And you have no way of easily seeing how frequently the product listing makes sales.

There's not a lot going on without the now-premium features

While some may want to do more extensive research, these I could
make 90% of my decisions on whether or not to buy something based on a glance
at these key details. Without them, I haven’t really got much use for the
basic, free version of Keepa. The only thing it’s good for is seeing when
Amazon dip in and out of stock on the listing.

There are other changes too. I don’t use the other functions
so I would have missed them. These are all of the things that now require a paid
subscription:

Sales Rank history

Buy Box price history

eBay price history

Offer count history

Review count history

5 token/minute API access

Price increase tracking

How Much Does Keepa Cost?

To unlock advanced features of Keepa, there are two different payment plan options:

€12 per month (which will convert to under £10.50)

€149/year (converting to under £129)

That’s very little considering how essential the tool is. However, that’s a big difference to £0. I can tell it will make new sellers think twice about whether they want to jump into this business, as it’s just another expense – another barrier to entry.

To sellers making significant profit
each month, it’s unlikely to phase them at all. It’s a minor expense. They’re
likely to be paying for other software too, so this is just another to add onto
that list. It’s probably going to be the cheapest one that they use for their
Amazon business after all.

Before you jump in and sign up for their subscription, there are two alternatives you need to consider. (And neither of them are CamelCamelCamel).

What are the Alternatives?

Rather than paying for Keepa’s advanced features, there are
two different things you can do. The first option is one that I don’t think is
going to last for very long, and the second is something I think advanced
sellers are going to be a lot more interested in.

Enable History Graph Overlays

There’s an option in the Keepa settings called “Show price history graphs as overlays when hovering Amazon products”. By simply enabling this, you will have the ability to hover over an Amazon product link and receive see a small, non-zoomable Keepa chart which displays a year’s worth of Sales Rank data.

Simple fix

You’re going to be frustrated that you can’t look any closer, but it gives you a quick look at whether or not the item you’re viewing sells or doesn’t. It’s better than nothing. However, it’s very likely this that this is something they’re going to disable in the future. It’s early days for the paid subscription, so it’s likely that this will disappear. As a quick fix for now, it gives you something to work with.

Example overlay on search results page – no numbers

BuyButPro

The other option is – rather than pay nearly £10 for a chart of data – pay for a tool that analyses and reports back on Keepa’s data. BuyBotPro is a tool I’ve been using for a few months, and I now have even more of a reason to rely on it for Amazon deal sourcing analysis.

Example BuyBotPro analysis

BuyBotPro is a:

Deal analyser

Profit calculator

Sales Rank checker

Sales predictor

Eligibility, hazmat and private label checker

Competitor stock reviewer

EFN calculator

VAT calculator

Order quantity suggester

Automated buy sheet filler

And now it includes a Keepa graph with Sales Rank data within its interface. At present it doesn’t have the Buy Box prices integrated into it, but they’re working on it.

Keepa graph incorporated into BuyBotPro

BuyBotPro costs £24.95/month, and is all-in-one tool made to take
the information from Keepa to inform you whether or not you should invest in particular
stock. The cost will put newer sellers off, but for intermediate and advanced
ones that want to reduce monthly software expenses, it’s worth considering
BuyBotPro instead of Keepa’s subscription.